The multicultural approach highlights the need to adapt social services for the general population to different cultural groups and minorities. The need for cultural adaptation is particularly important in Arab society in Israel, which is in a process of social and cultural transition. However, Arab social workers are not trained to provide culturally appropriate responses in this context. Rather, they usually act as representatives of the state in a context of political conflict, and this situation leads to cultural insensitivity on two levels. The article describes and examines the experience of social workers working with men in Arab society, and discusses the conflict inherent in their role as therapists on the one hand and as representatives of the Israeli establishment on the other. The study was based on in-depth interviews with 15 Arab social workers treating Arab fathers at parent-child centers in Israel. The findings indicate that the therapeutic encounter reflects the characteristics of their culture, and reflect the cultural and gender-based tensions that the social workers experience in the encounter with their clients. The findings further indicate that the social workers need to be aware of the social attitude of the fathers, and need to recognize the similarities and differences between their own cultural perspectives and the fathers' perspectives. The article contributes to the literature by focusing on the challenges inherent in the therapeutic encounter between Arab social workers and their clients, and highlights the complexity of their situation. Finally, it points to the lack of adequate academic preparation for Arab social workers in Israeli universities, as well as to the lack of support for those social workers and the challenges they face in their work.

Key words: culturally sensitive therapy, Arab society in Israel, therapeutic work with fathers, parent-child centers, social work

Unpaid household labor and the provision of care within families present an important determinant for individual and collective welfare. However, the increase of dual-earner couples and demographic shifts challenge traditional, mostly gendered arrangements of paid and unpaid labor within the household. Households are thus increasingly confronted with the decision whether to produce these ‘commodities’ by themselves or to buy services on the market. While economic explanations emphasize the relevance of time and labor costs for such outsourcing decisions, from a sociological viewpoint domestic work is deeply embedded in a normative and moral framework about family and gender which defines the very boundary between the market and the private household (Geissler, 2006; Lutz 2008).

Against this background the paper analyzes the demand for domestic services and child care in Germany and the UK during the past two decades. The central hypothesis states that the cultural framing of domestic work as “labor of love”, which plays a key role in the social construction of family life and gender identity, presents a crucial determinant whether domestic services are accepted as a substitute for own carework. The empirical analysis is based on a comparison of the UK, and East and West Germany using the German Socio-economic Panel (waves 1992-2012) and the British Household Survey (waves 1992-2008). The results indicate that in West Germany and the UK the actual demand for paid household services laggs behind „objective” needs supporting the idea that cultural and institutional framings are crucial for explaining patterns of demand.